Twice a year our Middle Schoolers and our High Schoolers go to camp – a time to take a few days to have fun and seek the LORD. These retreats for our youth reap precious commitments to our LORD, baptisms in the summer camps, and strengthen their friendships with other Christian kids their own age going through similar struggles in Middle School and High School. However, there is always the possibility that something can go wrong. Gratefully, we have never had a serious injury at any of these camps. This past High School Winter Camp was almost the exception. One of our High School girls, Whitney Hightower, was taken by ambulance to the hospital with a possible serious injury (because she is afraid of helicopters and begged to not be taken by Life Flight). Here is her story.

I have been to every camp since Middle School. This camp, like the others, was a great memory! This was the first camp I ever had something major happen to me.

It began on a hill. I wasn't going to go sledding but my friends looked like they were going to have a lot of fun so I decided I'd go. Not the wisest decision since I am a very injury proned person. A bunch of us were at the top of the hill, people were inner-tubing down the hill. I was just going to watch, laugh, and maybe sled down. You see, the top of the hill was dirt, not snow, so my friends needed someone to push them down the ice and then jump on for the ride down. My friends told me it was snow, I felt it as ice later. I pushed my two friends and then jumped on the inner tube. We are all small so when we were on our way down we were going real fast. Someone thought one of us put our foot on the ground as we tubed down, I thought we hit a weird bump. The inner tube flipped. I was the first to land. I landed on my left side. I felt a stinger pain in my neck and my whole left side went completely numb. My neck was in pain and I could not move it. It scared me! The leaders and other kids ran over to me. They thought I had broken my neck so they were holding onto my neck to stabilize it. The leaders and Brett were standing around me and praying over me. Someone called an ambulance and I was transported to River Bend Hospital where the doctors said I was fine and only had a bad whiplash and a bruised hip. When I came back to camp that night, someone told me that the whole camp had gotten together and prayed over me. That was really awesome for them to do! I think this brought our High School group together and their prayers were very influential in my being okay. It showed the power of prayer!

-- Whitney Hightower